The answer is sort of. Strictly speaking it is possible. You can indeed enable the Hyper-V role in a Server Core installation of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. I’ve done it on both OS’s on both VMware Workstation 6.5 and on Hyper-V. Logically this means you can deploy Hyper-V Server 2008 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 in a VM.

You can even create VM’s on the hosts. However, the hardware requirements are not passed through to the VM’s and therefore the hypervisor never starts up. That means you cannot start up those VM’s.

Why would you care? You certainly cannot do it in a production scenario. But you might find it handy when doing some demos, lab work or testing of clustering or VMM.

EDIT:

I have been told (but I have not tried this so I cannot say it will work) that you can get Hyper-V to install and run in an ESXi 3.X virtual machine. The performance is said to be awful, but might be useful for a lab with limited hardware.

This goes one step further than the Hyper-V scenario and I’m hoping with the next release of Hyper-V it might be possible to create full test rigs similar to VMWare. My aim with this set-up is to test the Powershell library for VMWare ESXi (including starting/stopping VMs) on a HP laptop which might well not have full hardware support for ESXi.

I tested with vmware workstation 7 and created a ESXi cluster with two nodes and virtual center. I used openfiler for iSCSI. (I have my VCP3.x and I like to upgrade my VCP to 4).
Inside this cluster I run a debian linux guest. After testing I was curious about Xenserver 5.5
I installed a Xen cluster on my vmware workstation. This time I did not use iSCSI but use NFS shared storage from my openfiler (iSCSI gives some problems with Xenserver running on Openfiler). And YES! it worked, I even manage to run a guest inside Xenserver (I used LAMP virtual appliance to run inside Xen). All free options work (like live migration)
Now I want to test Hyperv, to get knowledge of all popular VM products…..but I cannot start any guest :-(……
If someone find a workaround to run Hyperv with working guest on VM workstation…please let me know…If anyone wants to have information about configure ESXi or Xenserver on VMworkstation…mail me.

The hypervisor in Hyper-V will only work when it is installed directly onto compliant hardware, e.g. CPU assisted virtualisation and DEP both enabled. You cannot get a functioning Hyper-V hypervisor in a VM.

About This Blog

This blog serves 2 purposes. Firstly, I want to share information with other IT pros about the technologies we work with and how to solve problems we often face. I've worked with technologies from the desktop to the server, Active Directory, System Center, security and virtualisation.

Secondly, I use my blog as a notebook. There's so much to learn and remember in our jobs that it's impossible to keep up. By blogging, I have a notebook that I can access from anywhere. It has saved my proverbial many times in the past.

Waiver

Anything you do to your IT infrastructure, applications, services, computer or anything else is 100% down to your own responsibility and liability. Aidan Finn bears no responsibility or liability for anything you do. Please independently confirm anything you read on this blog before doing whatever you decide to do.